Tinkering with Governance: Technopolitics and the Economization of Citizenship

From statistics and mapping to engineering and medicine, technology has long been a tool of governance, shaping how nation states control their own and other regions' populations and natural resources. More recently, a nation's capacity to cultivate citizens as tech innovators and entrepreneurs is considered an indicator of its economic prosperity and global power. We show how this turn towards innovation and entrepreneurship is central to how technological and political elites tinker with new modes of governance and define the relationship between the future of the nation and its citizenry in economic terms. Drawing from long-term multi-sited ethnographic research in the United States, China, and Africa, we present a subset of findings to show how these shifts in governance are being enacted through interconnections between politicians and technologists, and the products, spaces, and educational ideals they fund and create. We argue that making sense of these shifts in governance is essential for current and future CSCW scholarship as they intersect with issues of power within social computing.